Space News & Blog Articles

On February 15th, Intuitive Machines (IM) launched its first Nova-C class spacecraft from Kennedy Space Center in Florida atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. On February 22nd, the spacecraft – codenamed Odysseus (or “Odie”) – became the first American-built vehicle to soft-land on the lunar surface since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. While the landing was a bit bumpy (Odysseus fell on its side), the IM-1 mission successfully demonstrated technologies and systems that will assist NASA in establishing a “sustained program of lunar exploration and development.”

After seven days of operation on the lunar surface, Intuitive Machines announced on February 29th that the mission had ended with the onset of lunar night. While the lander was not intended to remain operational during the lunar night, flight controllers at Houston set Odysseus into a configuration that would “call home” if it made it through the two weeks of darkness. As of March 23rd, the company announced that their flight controllers’ predictions were correct and that Odie would not be making any more calls home.

The company started listening for a wake-up signal from Odysseus on March 20th, when they projected that there was enough sunlight in the lander’s vicinity. At the time, it was thought that this could potentially charge Odysseus‘ power system, allowing it to activate its radio and reestablish contact with Houston. However, three days later, at 10:30 AM Central Standard Time (08:30 AM PST; 11:30 AM EST), flight controllers determined that the lander was not charging up after it completed its mission.

Image from the IM-1 Odysseus lander after it soft landed on the lunar surface. Credit: Intuitive Machines

This consisted of the Nova-C spacecraft making its inaugural soft landing on the Moon, the first time an American spacecraft has done so in over 50 years. The IM-1 mission was also the first time a spacecraft used methalox – the combination of liquid methane and liquid oxygen (LOX) – to navigate between the Earth and the Moon. While the IM-1 was not expected (or intended) to survive the lunar night, the data acquired by this mission could prove useful as the company continues to improve the lunar landing systems to deliver payloads to the Moon.

We can’t understand what we can’t clearly see. That fact plagues scientists who study how planets form. Planet formation happens inside a thick, obscuring disk of gas and dust. But when it comes to seeing through that dust to where nascent planets begin to take shape, astronomers have a powerful new tool: the James Webb Space Telescope.

In the past few years, we’ve been getting tantalizing looks at the protoplanetary disks around young stars. ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array, is responsible for that. It’s imaged many of these disks around young stars, including the telltale gaps where planets are likely forming.

Imaging the disks is now becoming a regular occurrence, but astronomers have only spotted two forming planets.

But now researchers have brought the JWST to bear on the problem. Three new studies in The Astronomical Journal present the results of that effort. They are:

The research combines new JWST observations with previous observations by the Hubble and ALMA. The astronomers behind each of the studies used the JWST to uncover new, early clues about the planet formation process, including how the process shapes the disk they’re born from. If they can identify features unique to planet formation, they can then look for these features around other disks.

Historical astronomical records from China and Japan recorded a supernova explosion in the year 1181. It was in the constellation Cassiopeia and it shone as bright as the star Vega for 185 days. Modern astronomers took their cue from their long-gone counterparts and have been searching for its remnant.

But it took them time to find it because they were looking for the wrong thing.

When a massive star runs out of fuel, it collapses in on itself and then explodes. It leaves behind a dense core where the protons and electrons are crushed into neutrons. It’s called a neutron star, and they’re the smallest and densest stellar objects in the Universe other than black holes.

It took a concerted effort from astronomers over the years to understand SN 1181’s remnant. At first, they couldn’t even find it.

For a time, researchers thought that the pulsar 3C 58 was the remnant. The ancient Chinese and Japanese records were not accurate enough to pinpoint SN 1181’s exact location, and the pulsar was the only known supernova remnant in the area. However, as astronomers studied 3C 58, they determined that it was much too old to be the remnant.

We know how stars form. Clouds of interstellar gas and dust gravitationally collapse to form a burst of star formation we call a stellar nursery. Eventually, the cores of these protostars become dense enough to ignite their nuclear furnace and shine as true stars. But catching stars in that birth-moment act is difficult. Young stars are often hidden deep within their dense progenitor cloud, so we don’t see their light until they’ve already started shining. But new observations from the Hubble Space Telescope have given us our earliest glimpse of a shiny new star.

You can see this image above, which captures the dusty region of the FS Tau system. The bright star just to the right of center is FS Tau A, which is a young star just 2.8 million years old. An infant compared to our Sun’s 4.6 billion years. But the exciting discovery is a bit higher and further right, known as FS Tau B. That line of dust obscuring the protostar is its protoplanetary disk seen edge-on. The light coming from the obscured star isn’t produced by nuclear fusion, but rather the late stages of gravitational collapse.

You can also see that the protostar has begun to produce radiant jets, which are reflected against the dusty nebula as regions of blue light. Because of this reflected light, FS Tau B is classified as a Herbig-Haro (HH) object. HH objects are great for helping astronomers understand the early dynamics of these stars.

FS Tau B is likely in the early stages of becoming a T Tauri star. These are sun-like stars just on the edge of becoming true stars. They can be quite active, with starspots and large flares, but can take 100 million years for one to ignite their cores and settle into a true main-sequence star. As that happens, protoplanets will form within the dusty disk, ready to become full planets in time.

You can find more information about the FS Tau system, as well as high-resolution images and videos, on the ESA Hubble website.

Anyone can be an underachiever, even if you’re an astronomical singularity weighing over four billion times the mass of the Sun. At least the quasar H1821+643 doesn’t have parents to be disappointed in it. But its underachievement could shed light on how quasars, a potent type of black hole, can come to influence entire clusters of galaxies, as described in a new paper from researchers at the University of Nottingham and Harvard.

Using X-ray data from the Chandra observatory, the researchers looked closely at H1821+643 and decided it influenced its local environment much less than expected. Granted, a lot was expected of it – quasars are super powerful black holes that rapidly pull in new material rapidly and eject radiation as well as sometimes emitting powerful streams of particles. In particular, H1821+643 is a quasar located about 3.4 billion light-years away from Earth at the center of a cluster of galaxies. 

Both the quasar and its surrounding galaxy are shrouded in a field of hot gas that showed up as a fuzzy haze in Chandra’s X-ray dataset. That fuzzy haze, which would let astronomers understand what was happening to the gas in the galaxy at large, was massively overwhelmed by the brightness of the X-rays emitted from the quasar itself.

To study the effects of the quasar on the location gas population, the researchers had to remove the effects of its own X-rays, leaving only the light emitted from the gas itself. They found that the gas is significantly less hot than might be expected given its proximity to such a forceful quasar, showing that the quasar itself isn’t outputting as much energy as might otherwise be expected.

Counterintuitively, the Chandra data shows that the density of gas around the quasar is higher. At the same time, the temperature is cooler than areas of the galaxy that are further away from the center. If the quasar were emitting the typical series of outbursts, they would have expected there to be not as much gas close to the quasar itself, as the outbursts would have blown it away and that what gas there was close in would be heated to extraordinarily high temperature by those same outbursts.

The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) was designed to examine the Sun, but as a side benefit, it has been the most successful comet hunter ever built. Since early in the mission, citizen scientists have been scanning through the telescope’s data, searching for icy objects passing close to the Sun. An astronomy student in Czechia has identified 200 comets in SOHO data since he started in 2009 at the age of 13. He recently spotted the observatory’s 5,000th comet.

“Prior to the launch of the SOHO mission and the Sungrazer Project, there were only a couple dozen sungrazing comets on record – that’s all we knew existed,” said Karl Battams, who is the principal investigator for the Sungrazer Project, the citizen science project that was launched after so many comets started showing up in the data. “The fact that we’ve finally reached this milestone – 5000 comets – is just unbelievable to me.”

SOHO moves around the Sun on the sunward side of Earth, where it enjoys a clear, uninterrupted view of the Sun, by slowly orbiting around Lagrange point L1.  That means it has been observing the Sun 24 hours a day, 365 days a year without interruptions since shortly after it launched in 1995. With this view, SOHO can easily spot the kind of comet that’s known as a sungrazer – so named because of their close approach to the Sun. Many of these comets don’t survive their close pass to the Sun.

Hanjie Tan is the student who discovered the 5,000th comet. Inspired by his many years of searching for comets, Tan is now an astronomy PhD student in Prague, Czechia, studying comets and asteroids. The small comet that he spotted is part of the ‘Marsden group’ of comets, named after the British astronomer Brian Marsden, who first recognized the group based on SOHO observations. Marsden group comets are thought to be pieces shed by the much bigger Comet 96P/Machholz, which SOHO observes as it passes close to the Sun every 5.3 years.

“The Marsden group comets represent only about 1.5% of all SOHO comet discoveries,” said Tan in an ESA press release, “so finding this one as the 5000th SOHO comet felt incredibly fortunate. It’s really exciting to be the first to see comets get bright near the Sun after they’ve been travelling through space for thousands of years.”

Measuring the distance to far away objects in space can be tricky. We don’t even know the precise distance to even our closest neighbors in the Universe – the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds. But, we’re starting to get to the tools to measure it. One type of tool is a Cepheid Variable – a type of star that varies its luminosity in a well-defined pattern. However, we don’t know much about their physical properties, making utilizing them as distance markers harder. Finding their physical properties would be easier if there were any Cepheid binaries that we could study, but astronomers have only found one pair so far. Until a recent paper from researchers from Europe, the US, and Chile shows measurements of 9 additional binary Cepheid systems – enough that we can start understanding the statistics of these useful distance markers.

Like traditional stars, binary Cepheid systems result when two stars orbit around each other. In this case, both of those stars must be Cepheids – meaning they are massive compared to our Sun and much brighter. In addition, their luminosity must vary in a repeatable pattern so that we can track it consistently.

All of those features can vary a lot if two stars change in luminosity but at different rates and phases around each other. It’s difficult to parse out which star is waxing, which is waning, and which direction they are moving in, both compared to us and each other. Long periods of observation are required to fix some of those variables, and that is precisely what the new paper describes.

The researchers looked at nine sets of Cepheids that were believed to be binary systems but hadn’t yet been confirmed due to the difficulty of separating the two stars from each other. They pulled data from the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE) database, a variable star observation project run by the University of Warsaw for over 30 years. In so doing, they could confirm, for the first time, that each of these suspected binaries contained two separate stars.

Those nine binary systems were located in the Small and Large Magellanic Cloud and the Milky Way. One located in the Milky Way is by far the closest, at only 11 kiloparsecs (about 3000 light-years) away. The researchers also had good luck because of the length of orbital periods of the binaries they studied – most were over five years, and a shorter observational data set might not have caught them. 

On September 26th, 2022, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) collided with the asteroid Dimorphos, a moonlet that orbits the larger asteroid Didymos. The purpose of this test was to evaluate a potential strategy for planetary defense. The demonstration showed that a kinetic impactor could alter the orbit of an asteroid that could potentially impact Earth someday – aka. Potentially Hazardous Asteroid (PHA). According to a new NASA-led study, the DART mission’s impact not only altered the orbit of the asteroid but also its shape!

The study was led by Shantanu P. Naidu, a navigation engineer with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) at Caltech. He was joined by researchers from the Lowell Observatory, Northern Arizona University (NAU), the University of Colorado Boulder (UCB), the Astronomical Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, and Johns Hopkins University (JHU). Their paper, “Orbital and Physical Characterization of Asteroid Dimorphos Following the DART Impact,” appeared on March 19th in the Planetary Science Journal.

The Didymos double asteroid system consists of an 851-meter-wide (2792 ft) primary orbited by the comparatively small Dimorphos. The latter was selected as the target for DART because any changes in its orbit caused by the impact would be comparatively easy to measure using ground-based telescopes. Before DART impacted with the moonlet, it was an oblate spheroid measuring 170 meters (560 feet) in diameter with virtually no craters. Before impact, the moonlet orbited Didymos with a period of 11 hours and 55 minutes.

Artist’s impression of the DART mission impacting the moonlet Dimorphos. Credit: ESA

Before the encounter, NASA indicated that a 73-second change in Dimorphos’ orbital period was the minimum requirement for success. Early data showed DART surpassed this minimum benchmark by more than 25 times. As Naidu said in a NASA press release, the impact also altered the moonlet’s shape:

Universe Today has had some fantastic discussions with researchers on the importance of studying impact craters, planetary surfaces, exoplanets, astrobiology, solar physics, comets, planetary atmospheres, and planetary geophysics, and how these diverse scientific fields can help researchers and the public better understand the search for life beyond Earth. Here, we will investigate the unique field of cosmochemistry and how it provides researchers with the knowledge pertaining to both our solar system and beyond, including the benefits and challenges, finding life beyond Earth, and suggestive paths for upcoming students who wish to pursue studying cosmochemistry. But what is cosmochemistry and why is it so important to study it?

“Cosmochemistry is the study of space stuff, the actual materials that make up planets, stars, satellites, comets, and asteroids,” Dr. Ryan Ogliore, who is an associate professor of physics at Washington University in St. Louis, tells Universe Today. “This stuff can take all the forms of matter: solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. Cosmochemistry is different from astronomy which is primarily concerned with the study of light that interacts with this stuff. There are two main benefits of studying actual astromaterials: 1) the materials record the conditions at the time and place where they formed, allowing us to look into the deep past; and 2) laboratory measurements of materials are extraordinarily precise and sensitive, and continue to improve as technology improves.”

In a nutshell, the field of cosmochemistry, also known as chemical cosmology, perfectly sums up Carl Sagan’s famous quote, “The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” To understand cosmochemistry is to understand how the Earth got here, how we got here, and possibly how life got wherever we’re (hopefully) going to find it, someday.

Like all scientific fields, cosmochemistry incorporates a myriad of methods and strategies with the goal of answering some of the universe’s most difficult questions, specifically pertaining to how the countless stellar and planetary objects throughout the universe came to be. These methods and strategies primarily include laboratory analyses of meteorites and other physical samples brought back from space, including from the Moon, asteroids, and comets. But what are some of the benefits and challenges of studying cosmochemistry?

“One of the primary benefits of cosmochemistry is the ability to reproduce measurements,” Dr. Ogliore tells Universe Today. “I can measure something in my lab, and somebody else can measure either the same object, or a very similar object, in another lab to confirm my measurements. Only after repeated measurements, by different labs and different techniques, will a given claim be universally accepted by the community. This is difficult to do in astronomy, and also difficult using remote-sensing measurements on spacecraft studying other bodies in the Solar System.”

Since its launch in 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has made some amazing discoveries. Recent observations have found a number of key ingredients required for life in young proto-stars where planetary formation is imminent. Chemicals like methane, acetic acid and ethanol have been detected in interstellar ice. Previous telescopic observations have only hinted at their presence as a warm gas. Not only have they been detected but a team of scientists have synthesised some of them in a lab.

These molecules found in the solid stage phase in young protostars are an indicator that the processes leading to formation of life may be more common than first thought. The complex organic molecules (COMs) were first predicted decades ago before space telescopes observations inconclusively identified them. A team of astronomers using the Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI) on the JWST as part of the James Webb Observations of Young ProtoStars programme have identified the COMs individually. 

One of the target objects observed as part of this study was IRAS 2A, a low mass protostar. The science team are particularly interested because the system has similar characteristics as our own star, the Sun. It gives us a great test bed to explore the processes of the Solar System and Earth’s development.

The presence in the solid phase and earlier detections in the gas phase suggests the process behind their existence is sublimation of ice. The process of sublimation is the transition straight from solid to gas without going through the liquid phase. The detection of COMs in ice suggests this is the origin of the COMs in gas. 

The scientific community are now looking at the liklihood of transportation of the COMs to early planets as they form around the young stars. It is believed that their transportation as an ice are far more efficient to the protoplanetary disks than as a gas. It is quite likely that the icy COMs can be transported and inherited by comets and asteroids  as the planets form. These new icy objects that develop can then, through their impacts, carry the complex molecules to planets, seeding them with the ingredients for life.

Solar sails rely upon pressure exerted by sunlight on large surfaces. Get the sail closer to the Sun and not surprisingly efficiency increases. A proposed new mission called Mercury Scout aims to take advantage of this to explore Mercury. The mission will map the Mercurian surface down to a resolution of 1 meter and, using the highly reflective sail surface to illuminate shadowed craters, could hunt for water deposits. 

Unlike conventional rocket engines that require fuel which itself adds weight and subsequently requires more fuel, solar sails are far more efficient. Light falling upon the sail can propel a prob across space. It’s a fascinating concept that goes back to the 1600’s when Johannes Kepler suggested the idea to Galileo Galilei. It wasn’t until the beginning of the 21st Century that the Planetary Society created the Cosmos 1 solar sail spacecraft. It launched in June 2005 but a failure meant it never reached orbit. The first successfully launched solar sail was Ikaros, launched by the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency it superbly demonstrated the feasibility of the technology. 

It has been known since 1905 that light is made up of tiny little particles known as photons. They don’t have any mass but while travelling through space, they do have momentum. When a tennis ball hits a racket, it bounces off the strings and some of the ball’s momentum is transferred to the racket. In a very similar way, photons of light hitting a solar sail transfer some of their momentum to the sail giving it a small push. More photons hitting the sail give another small push and as they slowly build up, the spacecraft slowly accelerates. 

Mercury Scout will take advantage of the solar sail idea as its main propulsion once it has reached Earth orbit. The main objectives for the mission are to map out the mineral distribution on the surface, high resolution imaging down to 1 meter resolution and identification of ice deposits in permanently shadowed craters. The solar sail was chosen because it offers significant technical and financial benefits lowering overall cost and reducing transit time to Mercury. 

To propel the Mercury Scout module, the sail will be around 2500 square meters and 2.5 microns thick. The material is aluminised CP1 which is similar to that used in the heat shield of the James Webb Space Telescope. The sails four separate quadrants unfurl along carbon fibre supports and will get to Mercury in an expected 3.8 years. On arrival it will transfer into a polar orbit and then spend another 176 days mapping the entire surface. 

From its vantage point at the Sun-Earth L2 point, the ESA’s Euclid spacecraft is measuring the redshift of galaxies with its sensitive instruments. Its first science images showed us what we can expect from the spacecraft. But the ESA noticed a problem.

Over time, less light was reaching the spacecraft’s instruments.

Euclid launched on July 1st, 2023 and made its way to the Sun-Earth Lagrange 2 point, the same spot where the JWST resides. Euclid is basically a wide-angle telescope with a 600 MB camera. Using its suite of scientific instruments, it measures the redshift of galaxies in an effort to understand the accelerating expansion of the Universe. Its measurements support the mission’s main science goals: to understand dark matter and dark energy.

Euclid released its first images in November 2023. To describe them as dazzling was not an exaggeration. Those images whetted our appetite for more and built anticipation for the science results to come.

But as time went on, a problem common to spacecraft cropped up. Water vapour from Earth had accumulated on the spacecraft during construction. Over time, the water was released from different parts of the spacecraft by the vacuum of space. The water attached to and froze to the first object it came into contact with. Some of it froze into a thin layer of water ice on VIS, the telescope’s visible wavelength camera. The layer was no thicker than a strand of DNA, but the sensitive instrument was nonetheless impaired.

Fresh imagery from the Event Horizon Telescope traces the lines of powerful magnetic fields spiraling out from the edge of the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, and suggests that strong magnetism may be common to all supermassive black holes.

The newly released image showing the surroundings of the black hole known as Sagittarius A* — which is about 27,000 light-years from Earth — is the subject of two studies published today in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. This picture follows up on an initial picture issued in 2022. Both pictures rely on radio-wave observations from the Event Horizon Telescope’s network of observatories around the world.

Sagittarius A* wasn’t the first black hole whose shadow was imaged by the EHT. Back in 2019, astronomers showed off a similar picture of the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy M87, which is more than a thousand times bigger and farther away than the Milky Way’s black hole.

In 2021, the EHT team charted the magnetic field lines around M87’s black hole by taking a close look at the black hole in polarized light, which reflects the patterns of particles whirling around magnetic field lines. Researchers used the same technique to determine the magnetic signature of Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A* for short.

Getting the image wasn’t easy, largely due to the fact that Sgr A* was harder to pin down than M87. The EHT team had to combine multiple views to produce a composite image.

The Solar System’s icy ocean moons are primary targets in our search for life. Missions to Europa and Enceladus will explore these moons from orbit, improving our understanding of them and their potential to support life. Both worlds emit plumes of water from their internal oceans, and the spacecraft sent to both worlds will examine those plumes and even sample them.

New research suggests that evidence of life in the moons’ oceans could be present in just a single grain of ice, and our spacecraft can detect it.

It’s all because of improvements to scientific instruments, particularly the mass spectrometer. Mass spectrometers can identify unknown chemical compounds by their molecular weights and can also quantify known compounds. These instruments are now powerful enough to detect a tiny amount of cellular material.

“For the first time, we have shown that even a tiny fraction of cellular material could be identified by a mass spectrometer onboard a spacecraft,” said Fabian Klenner, a University of Washington postdoctoral researcher in Earth and space sciences. Klenner is also the lead author of a new paper in the journal Science Advances. “Our results give us more confidence that using upcoming instruments, we will be able to detect lifeforms similar to those on Earth, which we increasingly believe could be present on ocean-bearing moons.”

The new research is “How to identify cell material in a single ice grain emitted from Enceladus or Europa.“

If all goes well, NASA’s Artemis III mission will bring humans back to the Moon as early as 2026, the first time since the Apollo 17 crew departed in 1972. It won’t be a vacation, though, as astronauts have an enormous amount of science to do, especially in lunar geology. A team from NASA recently presented their planetary science goals and objectives for Artemis III surface activities, which will guide the fieldwork the astronauts will carry out on the lunar surface.

The Artemis III Geology Team presented their priorities at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in March 2024. In addition, NASA also announced their choices for the first science instruments that astronauts will deploy on the surface of the Moon during Artemis III.

The landing site hasn’t been chosen yet, but it will be within 6 degrees of latitude from the South Pole. These instruments will collect valuable scientific data about the lunar environment, the lunar interior, and how to sustain a long-duration human presence on the Moon, which will help prepare NASA to send astronauts to Mars.

“Artemis marks a bold new era of exploration, where human presence amplifies scientific discovery. With these innovative instruments stationed on the Moon’s surface, we’re embarking on a transformative journey that will kick-start the ability to conduct human-machine teaming – an entirely new way of doing science,” said NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy. “These three deployed instruments were chosen to begin scientific investigations that will address key Moon to Mars science objectives.”

Two of the three main Artemis science goals and the instruments deal with understanding the Moon itself. The Lunar Environment Monitoring Station (LEMS) is a compact, autonomous seismometer suite will help study planetary processes, while the Lunar Dielectric Analyzer (LDA) will aid in understanding the character and origin of lunar polar volatiles. The third main science objective will investigate how to mitigate the risks of human exploration, and to that end the Lunar Effects on Agricultural Flora (LEAF) instrument will investigate the lunar surface environment’s effects on space crops to see if the lunar regolith can be used to grow food.  

In an effort to enhance the educational outreach of their Starlink constellation, SpaceX has an interactive global map of their Starlink internet satellites, which provides live coverage of every satellite in orbit around the Earth. This interactive map comes as SpaceX continues to launch Starlink satellites into orbit on a near-weekly basis with the goal of providing customers around the world with high-speed internet while specifically targeting rural regions of the globe. In 2022, Starlink officially reached all seven continents after Starlink service became available in Antarctica. Additionally, SpaceX announced in 2023 a partnership with T-Mobiel for Starlink to provide mobile coverage, as well.

Within this interactive map, users can opt to see live satellite coverage or rewind and fast forward their respective orbital speeds. Scrolling your mouse will highlight each satellite, and clicking on them will produce their individual satellite information and orbital trajectory, enabling the user to see if a particular satellite will pass over their location. Additionally, users can rotate the Earth and zoom in to anywhere on the planet. All in all, this interactive map gives users near-total control over identifying Starlink satellites currently orbiting the Earth.

To complement the interactive map, users can find data on the number of satellites both launched and currently in orbit, noting a few hundred of the several thousand satellites have been deorbited to burn up on re-entry. As of this writing, 5,977 satellites have been launched with 5,601 satellites currently in operation, and the remaining 376 having been deorbited for a variety of reasons, including failing to reach their target orbit or containing design flaws, as Elon Musk recently announced he plans to deorbit 100 Starlink satellites slowly degrading their orbits over the next five years.

Scrolling down the left menu provides users with information pertaining to the running gigabytes and terabytes having been sent to Earth, along with the most recent and next Starlink launch by SpaceX. Additionally, this menu provides the average time between Starlink launches, along with the number of satellites in orbit by SpaceX’s competition and how many Starlinks jobs are presently available at SpaceX.

As noted, the goal of Starlink is to provide worldwide high-speed internet, with the interactive map noting “The Starlink constellation could serve up to 188,180 MB/sec to Earth.” Despite the more than 5,500 Starlink satellites currently in orbit, SpaceX hopes to launch up to 12,000 satellites during this phase and possibly 42,000, someday.

Every time a star forms, it represents an explosion of possibilities. Not for the star itself; its fate is governed by its mass. The possibilities it signifies are in the planets that form around it. Will some be rocky? Will they be in the habitable zone? Will there be life on any of the planets one day?

There’s a point in every solar system’s development when it can no longer form planets. No more planets can form because there’s no more gas and dust available, and the expanding planetary possibilities are truncated. But the total mass of a solar system’s planets never adds up to the total mass of gas and dust available around the young star.

What happens to the mass, and why can’t more planets form?

When a protostar forms in a cloud of molecular hydrogen, it’s accompanied by a rotating disk of gas and dust called a circumstellar disk. As material gathers into larger and larger bodies, planetesimals form, and eventually, planets. At that point, the disk is referred to as a protoplanetary disk. But whatever we call it, the rotating disk is the reservoir of material out of which planets form.

In our Solar System, there are more rocky objects than gaseous ones. Not by mass but by number. Scientists think that systems similar to ours form similar numbers of rocky and gaseous objects.

Saturn’s moon, Enceladus, is a gleaming beacon that captivates our intellectual curiosity. Its clean, icy surface makes it one of the most reflective objects in the entire Solar System. But it’s what’s below that ice that really gets scientists excited.

Under its icy shell is an ocean of warm, salty water, and the ESA says investigating the moon should be a top priority.

Enceladus is Saturn’s sixth-largest moon. It’s only about 500 km (300 miles) in diameter. But despite its small size, it may harbour a buried ocean containing 15 million cubic km of water. (Earth has about 1.4 billion cubic kilometres of water.)

The Cassini spacecraft spotted plumes of water coming from under the ice, and ever since then, scientists have hungered for a closer look at the moon. The European Space Agency (ESA) aims to give them one.

“The mission concepts that we have recommended would provide tremendous scientific return, driving forward our knowledge, and would be fundamental for the successful detection of biosignatures on icy moons.”

Even with all we’ve learned about Mars in recent years, it doesn’t stack up against all we still don’t know and all we hope to find out. We know that Mars was once warm and wet, a conclusion that was less certain a couple of decades ago. Now, scientists are working on uncovering the details of Mars’s ancient water.

New research shows that the Gale Crater, the landing spot for NASA’s MSL Curiosity, held water for a longer time than scientists thought.

Life needs water, and it needs stability. So, if Gale Crater held water for a long time, it strengthens the idea that Mars could’ve supported life. We know that Gale Crater is an ancient paleolake, and this research suggests that the region could’ve been exposed to water for a longer duration than thought. But was it liquid water?

The research is titled “Ice? Salt? Pressure? Sediment deformation structures as evidence of late-stage shallow groundwater in Gale crater, Mars.” It’s published in the journal Geology, and the lead author is Steven Banham. Banham is from the Imperial College of London’s Department of Earth, Science, and Engineering.

The research centers on desert sandstone that Curiosity found.

In the constellation of Orion, there is a brilliant bluish-white star. It marks the right foot of the starry hunter. It’s known as Rigel, and it is the most famous example of a blue supergiant star. Blue supergiants are more than 10,000 times brighter than the Sun, with masses 16 – 40 times greater. They are unstable and short-lived, so they should be rare in the galaxy. While they are rare, blue supergiants aren’t as rare as we would expect. A new study may have figured out why.

We aren’t entirely sure how these massive stars form, though one idea is that they occur when a massive main sequence star passes through an interstellar cloud. By capturing gas and dust from the cloud, a star can shift off the main sequence to become a blue supergiant. Another idea is that they may form within stellar nurseries with a mass as great as 300 Suns. As a result, they quickly burn so brightly that they never become true main-sequence stars. Both of these models predict that blue supergiants are much more rare than the number we observe.

This new study starts by noting that blue supergiants, particularly the smaller ones known as B-type supergiants, are rarely seen with companion stars. This is odd since most massive stars form as part of a binary or multiple system. The authors propose that B-type blue supergiants aren’t often in binary systems because they typically are the product of binary mergers.

The team simulated a range of models where a giant main-sequence star has a smaller close-orbiting companion and then looked at what would result if the two stars merged. They then compared the results to observations of 59 young blue supergiant stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud. They found that not only can these mergers produce blue supergiants in the mass range of the Magellanic stars, but the spectra of the simulated mergers match the spectra of the 59 blue supergiants. This strongly suggests that many if not most B-type blue supergiants are the result of stellar mergers.

In the future, the team would like to carry this work further to see how blue supergiants evolve into neutron stars and black holes. This could help explain the type of mergers observed by gravitational wave observatories such as LIGO and Virgo.